Do they know it’s Christmas?

Wow. It’s already Christmas (圣诞节, shèng dàn jié). Despite the presence of a few Christmas decorations that have been popping up around the city for the past few weeks and the cheesy Mandopop Christmas songs that have been following me from every window and door I pass, I never really felt it coming. I hadn’t really expected much to be going on here in the way of Christmassy events, so I’d planned to just hang out with some friends and share whatever treats and traditions I could scrape together. But one of my teachers told us last week that Christmas Eve (known in China as 平安夜 (píng ān yè, “peaceful, safe and sound night”), is actually a pretty lively event downtown, so we went to check it out.

As it turns out, they do know it’s Christmas in China. Or at least they know it’s December 24th, and that it’s a holiday called Christmas. And they certainly do celebrate. But what I witnessed here bore more resemblance to Halloween or New Year’s Eve than any Christmas I’ve ever seen. Apparently, in China, Christmas is a holiday of chaos and mischief. So much for peaceful, safe and sound.

We walked to downtown Beibei just after dark. The streets were already clogged with people. A stream of honking cars and motorcycles threaded through the crowds, while vendors spread their wares across the sidewalks. Most of them were selling glowsticks, light-up devil horn headbands, cans of coloured spray foam, and large, inflatable plastic weapons. By the time we’d shuffled about a block into the crowd, I’d gathered that the main point of Christmas here is to run amok, spraying foam at everyone in arm's reach and beating them with inflatable hammers. Groups of little kids and teenagers wearing glowing devil horns over their Santa hats chased each other shrieking through the streets, emptying cans of foam into each other's faces and beating each other with the inflatable weapons until they deflated and were tossed to the muddy, foamy, garbage-strewn pavement. Several kids were igniting the spray foam with lighters. I got beaten by a couple of random people with hammers and my roommate got sprayed a bit while we tried to slither between the densely-packed bodies to someplace a little less crowded. We found ourselves at an outdoor market I’d never seen before and browsed the candies, preserved fruits and pickled vegetables for a few minutes before turning back to brave the crowds. We were only downtown about an hour, but by the time we’d fought our way back to the street we’d come in on the crowds had doubled. We decided at that point we’d had enough and headed home before we could get trampled.

On the way back we passed numerous vendors selling piles of large, pale pink apples, some of which were wrapped in a flourish of coloured cellophane. Rather than oranges, as in the West, Christmas is associated with apples here due to the seasonal sentiments reflected in the sound of the name; the 苹 (píng) in the word for apple (苹果, píng guǒ) sounds the same as the 平(píng, meaning peace) in 平安夜. They're a ubiquitous Christmas gift here and all week I've been seeing people lugging huge bags of them around to share with their friends and families.

Chinese word of the day:
节日
jié rì
Holiday